Let Love Sleep
by The Exile
Summary: A sonnet for the Sega I remember.


_We who are the Wandering Gods must sleep,_

It's hard to sleep on nights like these, so I take the time to sit and write letters to you, my beloved Fallen Goddess.

It feels wrong, sleeping underneath skies that aren't our own. We never really were that good at travelling, were we? It seemed that our energy drained away so quickly, and we spent a lot of time asleep. These days, existing in itself takes it out of me. I think it is a miracle I exist at all, and only barely possible within the world's constraints. It is a harsh price, my continued existence in exchange for my future.

I think I would sleep sounder if I could sense you there beside me, sleek and dark, small and elegant, like a prowling cat silhouetted against the moon, your heartbeat not frail but clear and constant as the sun that I thought would always rise when I woke.

_We who are the Sleeping Gods must dream,_

I was warned it would be like this, going into exile. That I would become Sleeping Beauty in her crystal coffin, untouched and forgotten by a time that has left me behind. That I would live in my own dreams, because there would be no place left for me in the waking world. My history already ended a long time ago, written out of the history books by the victors. It is a beautiful dream we live in, these memories of ours, and there are enough who still remember that we may never fade away, but there will never be a tomorrow, never another world created by our own hand, and those that we created before are no longer our own, are no longer anything at all.

_We who dream creation into being,_

I wasn't alive when you created your first world, but I remember the height of your power. The cerulean crystal spires of our palaces soared into the skies that bore our names. You used to rival the other deities, despite being the youngest, and there was always some fight or other. I think maybe you enjoyed the conflicts more than you really ought to, but you were no fragile little rose, there was a side of you that was a Valkyrie who laughed as she killed with her sword of blue flame. I was hurt in a lot of those conflicts as I fought fiercely for you, defended your honour with an unshakeable faith and never left your side for a moment on the battlefield. It wasn't the battles I loved, it was the wonders that we created in order to prove that we could. We followed our own dream, one that no other could replicate, and we went beyond what they had ever achieved, until our worlds were raised high, the most glittering jewels in the sky, and the whole Universe knew our name.

_We who give the celestial bodies their names,_

As I grew older and saw that war was folly, I realised that it wasn't that side of you I loved, but the dark side of your planets, the subtly flawed jewels that only the expert could see were worth more. I did not want to serve you out of the necessity of war, or through blind fanaticism, but because I had experienced every facet of your worlds with all my senses, year after year. I travelled their expanses wide, and I have to admit I paid visits to your rivals, to see for myself that you were as beautiful and unique in comparison as I had been taught all my life that you were. In the end, it was the second to last world you ever created, when your sun had already begun to set, that I decided to live in. You seemed surprised when I told you that. All eyes were still on your second creation, and I had grown up there, although I was born in your first. All the best stories, all the most important times in my life, somehow still happened in the third. It was a revelation to me as well, once I realised what had happened to me. Well, it wasn't a sudden decision, it was more of a gradual change that had happened in my mind, a shift in my values, as though I wasn't the same person. Maybe I could only understand love once I was no longer a child.

Or maybe absence really does make the heart grow fonder, and I only really understood what I had once it was lost. After all, you were already gone long before then, the news just hadn't reached me yet, lost as I was in a place that nobody visited any more.

_Were the Masters of our fates, and will not be forgotten, as we walk silent through our vaunted mausoleum._

I imagined I would grow more cynical as I grew older. I would retire on the third planet and watch you build your eighth, and I would complain that you didn't make them like they used to, that you never went back to your sixth any more and you were beginning to forget you even had a seventh. I was worried we would grow distant over time, that I might even consider leaving you behind. It is ironic that something like this ensured that I would never see that happen.

Meet me in my dreams, my Goddess, and we will dream the dream of exiles together, my arm in yours. At least now we shall know peace. Or maybe we will walk into the darkness, and the Universe will never know our kind again.


End file.
